The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy maintains this blog to disseminate information relevant to astronomers who identify as women. If you have an idea for a blog post or topic, please submit to wia-blog at lists.aas.org.
The views expressed on this site are not necessarily the views of the CSWA, the AAS, its Board of Trustees, or its membership.

A recent paper on arXiv (1409.3528) by I. Neill Reid at STScI is an eye-opener. It presents a detailed study of gender bias in HST guest observer selection. The results are very clear: female PIs are systematically less successful in winning HST observing time than their male colleagues.

2. Career Profiles: Astronomer to Associate Director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute

From: Laura Trouille via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with Doris Daou, an astronomer turned Associate Director of the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For years, people have been puzzling over why there are so few women in science, technology, engineering and math, and why the university professors who teach the subjects are predominantly men. Is it genetics? Preference? Caregiving responsibilities? An unwelcoming environment?

Turns out, according to a new study released Thursday on men in academic science, it may have a lot to do with the boss.

The majority of tenured full professors at some of the most prestigious universities in the country, who have the most power to hire and fire and set the workplace expectation of long hours, are men who have either a full-time spouse at home who handles all caregiving and home duties, or a spouse with a part-time or secondary career who takes primary responsibility for the home.

4. Career Profiles: Astronomer to Chief of the Nautical Almanac Office

From: Laura Trouille via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with Sethanne Howard, an astronomer turned Chief of the Nautical Almanac Office at the US Naval Observatory. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

Gender equity in the corporate world has long been a goal that’s paid much lip service, but has nothing to enforce it but good intentions. Unsatisfied with the slow progress, a handful of countries have, over the last ten years, embraced the idea of gender quotas to govern corporate boards (a potential solution to inequality Bryce Covert suggested in a piece for The New Republic this summer). According to the 2014 International Business Report, the percentage of world business leaders in favor of gender quotas has increased from 37 percent in 2013 to 45 percent in 2014. And it isn’t just in Europe, where the quota trend began. 68 percent of leaders surveyed in Latin American and 71 percent of those in Asia Pacific (not including Japan) supported gender quotas.

The phrase “white privilege” is one that rubs a lot of white people the wrong way. It can trigger something in them that shuts down conversation or at least makes them very defensive. (Especially those who grew up relatively less privileged than other folks around them). And I’ve seen more than once where this happens and the next move in the conversation is for the person who brought up white privilege to say, “The reason you’re getting defensive is because you’re feeling the discomfort of having your privilege exposed.”

I’m sure that’s true sometimes. And I’m sure there are a lot of people, white and otherwise, who can attest to a kind of a-ha moment or paradigm shift where they “got” what privilege means and they did realize they had been getting defensive because they were uncomfortable at having their privilege exposed. But I would guess that more often than not, the frustration and the shutting down is about something else. It comes from the fact that nobody wants to be a racist. And the move “you only think that because you’re looking at this from the perspective of privilege” or the more terse and confrontational “check your privilege!” kind of sound like an accusation that someone is a racist (if they don’t already understand privilege). And the phrase “white privilege” kind of sounds like, “You are a racist and there’s nothing you can do about it because you were born that way.”

Join us for an informal meeting and discussion hour over lunch on Tuesday, November 11th from 12:00-1:30. This year’s topics will revolve around the ideas of powerful communication and how to be an ally to minority community members. We will have presentation material interspersed with plenty of discussion time. Please feel free to bring any information/announcements related to women in astronomy and planetary science to share.

The next AAS Astronomy Ambassadors workshop will be held 3-4 January 2015 at the 225th AAS meeting in Seattle, Washington. The number of participants is limited. We will have sessions appropriate for both those who have done some outreach already and those just starting their outreach adventures, and we especially encourage applications from members of groups that are presently underrepresented in science. If interested, please complete the online application form by 20 October 2014.